Quotes from Rivalry and Central Planning

By Don Lavoie (1985)

• The question [of market socialism] is no longer whether a nonrivalrous conscious plan can supplant the coordinating function of rivalrous competition among private owners but the related question of whether rivalrous competition can perform its function when the competitors are not private owners.#
  EconomicsSocialism
• A basic problem with marginal cost rules is that they depend on costs being objectively known, whereas when property is privately held, costs are estimates that are “verified” only by the earning of profits. Thus there is a fundamental difference between, on the one hand, the tendency for producers, impelled by competitive profit seeking, to equate price to marginal cost and on the other the explicit instruction to directly attain this marginal “cost equals price” result.#
  EconomicsSocialism
• The labor theory approach essentially reduces all scarcities to scarcity of labor time, but the practical task before the central planners is to husband all scarce goods.#
  EconomicsMethodologySocialism
• The use of the unconscious ordering mechanism of the price system and money calculations has led to such an advance in the complexity of the social production process as a whole that it is no longer possible for the human mind to directly subsume this process under conscious control.#
  Economics